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Overview

The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles

Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer’s best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” So begins Robert Fagles’ magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in the New York Times Book Review hails as “a distinguished achievement.”

If the Iliad is the world’s greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of an everyman’s journey through life. Odysseus’ reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends retold here,

Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer’s original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox’s superb introduction and textual commentary provide insightful background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles’s translation. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new generation of Homer’s students. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Praise

“[Fitzgerald’s Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer’s art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase.” –The Yale Review

“[In] Robert Fitzgerald’s translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world.” –from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney

Homer: The OdysseyBook 1: Athena Inspires the PrinceBook 2: Telemachus Sets SailBook 3: King Nestor RemembersBook 4: The King and Queen of SpartaBook 5: Odysseus-Nymph and ShipwreckBook 6: The Princess and the StrangerBook 7: Phaeacia’s Halls and GardensBook 8: A Day for Songs and ContestsBook 9: In the One-Eyed Giant’s CaveBook 10: The Bewitched Queen of AeaeaBook 11: The Kingdom of the DeadBook 12: The Cattle of the SunBook 13: Ithaca at LastBook 14: The Loyal SwineherdBook 15: The Prince Sets Sail for HomeBook 16: Father and SonBook 17: Stranger at the GatesBook 18: The Beggar-King of IthacaBook 19: Penelope and her GuestBook 20: Portents GatherBook 21: Odysseus Stings his BowBook 22: Slaughter in the HallBook 23: The Great Rooted BedBook 24: Peace

NotesTranslator’s PostscriptGenealogiesTextual Variants from the Oxford Classical TextNotes on the TranslationSuggestions for Further ReadingPronouncing Glossary